Leftovers

• Tedium ☛ Turn Off The Pillow Machines

  Amazon’s plans to shift its packaging strategy points at a new front in the lengthy tug of war between paper and plastic—a war that started in grocery stores.

• Science

  • Better arguments make arguments better

    Cut through bullshit arguments fast and make project discussions more productive.

  • Hackaday ☛ Fixed Point Math Exposed

    If you are used to writing software for modern machines, you probably don’t think much about computing something like one divided by three. Modern computers handle floating point quite well. However, in constrained systems, there is a trap you should be aware of. While modern compilers are happy to let you use and abuse floating point numbers, the hardware is often woefully slow. It also tends to eat up lots of resources. So what do you do? Well, as [Low Byte Productions] explains, you can opt for fixed-point math.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Rescued IMac G4 Restored And Upgraded With Mac Mini M1 Guts

    The Apple iMac G4 was also lovingly referred to as the ‘Apple iLamp’ due to its rather unique design with the jointed arm on which the display perches. Released in 2002 and produced until 2004, it was the first iMac to feature an LCD. With only a single-core G4 PowerPC CPU clocked at around 1 GHz, they’re considered e-waste by the average person.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Nvidia to sell its advanced Hey Hi (AI) buzzword processors to Middle East countries, despite sanctions

    Nvidia to supply Hey Hi (AI) buzzword GPUs to Ooredoo, a telecom giant that operates in six Middle East countries.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Science Alert ☛ The Risk Factors For Long COVID Have Finally Been Revealed

    We now know who's most likely to get it.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Government orders probe after 9-hour system glitch stopped Hong Kong airport display screens from functioning

    The Hong Kong government has ordered an investigation into a nine-hour system glitch that stopped the airport’s display screens from working on Sunday. The Airport Authority said the system failure was not due to a cyberattack and apologised for causing inconvenience to passengers.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Researchers hope to quash Hey Hi (AI) hallucination bugs that stem from words with more than one meaning

    Semantic entropy is when we use words that have multiple meanings, thus leading to confusion. The researchers want to use this as a way to estimate the chance that an Hey Hi (AI) is hallucinating.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • IT Wire ☛ Big media firms trying to get govt to cover Facebook (Farcebook) money

      So it looks like the government will finally do what it has done in the past: hand out taxpayer funds to rich media companies and do so quietly.

      This shameful exercise will be gone through at the same time as brave noises are made about the "terrible" social control media companies.

      Media companies that receive money in this way are highly unlikely to reveal it.

      The loser, as usual, will be the taxpayer.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Strategist ☛ Australia’s most pressing defence challenge: skills

    The evolution of warfare in the 21st century has ushered in an era of cyber conflicts, artificial intelligence  and autonomous systems.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • CS Monitor ☛ Niger bet on a China-backed oil pipeline. Now, the project is stalled.

      An internal security crisis and a diplomatic dispute threaten a China-backed pipeline in Niger. Observers worry that the stalled pipeline operation could halt the country's economic growth.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ An Egyptian Bank Claimed Details of a Suspected $10 Million Payment to Trump Might be in China

    A bank owned by Egypt said it couldn't comply with a subpoena seeking information on a suspected payment to Trump during the 2016 election, in part, because China's laws would prevent that.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Straits Times ☛ Seeking more teeth, Malaysia set to license social control media, messaging apps

    This comes amid growing concern over freedom of speech, with Kuala Lumpur stepping up online censorship since 2023.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • JURIST ☛ Punjab, Pakistan imposes protest restrictions as opposition calls for nationwide demonstrations

    The Punjab, Pakistan government imposed protest restrictions on Friday citing the “law and order situation” and security threats posed by demonstrations. The order came at the time when Pakistan’s previous ruling party, Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) had called for a nationwide protest to release its leader and Pakistan’s ex-prime minister, Imran Khan from jail.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Sahilister ☛ Sahil Dhiman: How I Write Blogs - June 2024 Edition

    I wrote about my blog writing methodology back April 2021. My writing method has undergone a significant shift now, so thought about writing this update.

    New blog topics are added to my note-taking app quite frequently now. Occasionally going through the list, I merge topics, change order to prioritize certain topics or purely drop ideas which seems not worth a write-up. Due to this, I have the liberty to work on blogs according to mood. Writing the last one was tiring, so I chose to work on an easy one, i.e. this blog now.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Ruben Schade ☛ We’ve had high fidelity music for a while now

    Riding off the back of my (controversial, le sigh!) post earlier this year about the compact audio cassette, today I thought I’d talk about a broader observation I’ve made recently.